NEWS FLASHes! and Wednesday's (Not So) Random Slang-o-rama: Knock me over with a feather

NOTE: I'm letting this post stand for two weeks, straddling the end/beginning of the year. New slang-o-rama appearing January 9. Wishing everyone a good start to 2019!)
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Well, this has been quite the month! When I heard that True West Magazine in their "Best of the West 2019" listed my sixth Silver Rush historical mystery, A Dying Note, as Best Mystery in the Best Fiction category, well, you could've knocked me over with a feather! And then, when I learned that A Dying Note is also long-listed for the Martin Cruz Smith Award in Suspense/Mystery by the NICBA (Northern California Independent Booksellers Association), you could've knocked me over again!... But that wasn't all. The latest "knock 'em over" news is that my publisher, Poisoned Pen Press, has been acquired (? correct verb ?) by SourceBooks. Poisoned Pen Press will now be an imprint of this much larger indie publisher.

Through my jubilation, gratitude, and surprise, the thought came sneaking: How long has the idiom knocked over with a feather been around? When was it first used?

It didn't take me long to find out...
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The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms by Christine Ammer includes this phrase under the idiom knock for a loop, as follows:

knock for a loop. Also, throw for a loop; knock down or over with a feather; knock sideways—Overcome with surprise or astonishment... The first two of these hyperbolic colloquial usages, dating from the first half of the 1900s, allude to the comic-strip image of a person pushed hard enough to roll over in the shape of a loop. The third hyperbolic term, often put as You could have knocked me down with a feather, intimating that something so light as a feather could knock one down, dates from the early 1800s; the fourth was first recorded in 1925.

I guess my 1880s characters can be knocked down (or over) with a feather, but not knocked sideways or in a loop!

 

There's also a fascinating discussion of this very term in this StackExchange exchange. One of the responders found that the idiom dates back to 1796 (squeaking in as an 18th century expression) in William Cobbett's Porcupine's works: 

Fascinating, eh?